Black is black, and white is white, but it's what lay between determines much about what we see.

Writing about a trip into the heart of the Rockies, cameras in hand, H.E. Clark came to a nuanced conclusion regarding gradations of color and the image before us.

"Although the picture would be called black and white," Clark wrote, "I learned it is better to consider the photographer's palette as a thousand shades of gray … to incorporate as many gray tones as possible, while including the blackest blacks and the whitest whites."

In fact, what even Clark might not have realized is that to exclude elements of gray from what we look at is to shortchange the eye. It's to give up detail and clarity. Turns out, gray is critical to the intensity of every image, even if we don't know it at first glance.

And since Samsung is deeply invested in the images its GALAXY Tab S displays, the tablet's designers have given a good deal of thought to what you miss when you don't see enough gray — and the right degrees of gray — every time, on every screen. Let's take a closer look at the importance of this surprisingly crucial color, and how their work is finally giving gray its digital due on the screens of one very advanced device.

The Issue: Gray Is Key in Brightness Perception

Image: Samsung

While in most people's minds gray might not be the most vibrant, arresting or exciting part of the spectrum, without it, a great deal of what we perceive about the world would change.

In large part, gray dictates details of brightness to the eye.

Dan Carr, writing in a report issued by George Mason University puts it this way: Levels of gray in an image help us to differentiate brightness in ways that hue and saturation just can't achieve. Worse, relying only upon hues and saturation can confuse our eyes, making us see relative brightness in an image inaccurately. And that's how you lose key details.

The Solution: Super AMOLED Technology

Image: Samsung

Luckily, this is an issue solved by the technology driving Samsung's GALAXY Tab S display. Depth and image clarity — in addition to more true-to-life colors, in the first place — emerge in new ways within the GALAXY Tab S display because of its Super AMOLED technology.

Standing for active-matrix organic light-emitting diode, what Super AMOLED really means is that instead of the standard LCDs that can't emit light on their own, AMOLEDs produce their own illumination.

With other kinds of displays, a backlight is needed to illuminate all those LCDs, and then added to that are color filters and a light diffuser and other layers needed to create the image. Problem is, you're blocking and altering the amount of light and clarity that can reach the eye.

Super AMOLED doesn't do that. Every pixel creates its own light, and each of them sends your eye unimpeded colors and details — each and every pixel is alive.

Aside from visual richness, depth and image clarity, when compared to conventional LCD tablets, the GALAXY Tab S provides a contrast ratio that's about 100 times better – the AMOLED technology has a contrast ratio of 100,000:1. This level of contrast proves important, especially when it comes to catching vital details.

For example, when you're watching a horror movie, the darkened scenes are critical. Consider what you’ve seen so far, sans Super AMOLED contrast:

Image: Samsung

If you had Super AMOLED, you wouldn’t have missed what’s lurking in the shadows:

Underneath it all, this boils down to the very important effect of those crucial grays never looking black or white. They're appearing exactly as they're supposed to … and doing what they're supposed to do within the image. And that, as scientists such as Carr and lovers of the image such as Clark have told us, is where so many of the important details lie.

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